Perhaps you are right and there is some systematic issue.

I graduated from high school in 1977. I was not, shall we say, a math whiz. Senior math SAT 636, poor grades in pre-calc. Calculus in college I found impossible.

I solved the Helen’s bike problem in my head in 40 seconds.

So, in the interests of science, I had my kids (who range from 12-25) to do it. One got it right, after a somewhat complex series of operations (but she could show her work!).

Several kids insisted on 28.32, one was lost.

I reduced it to “how far did she go in how much time, 15 minutes x 4 = 60, 7km x 4 = 28 with no pencil, no paper, and (especially) no calculator.

Perhaps there is a systematic issue with math instruction.

A very few people are like Newton, able to develop the concept of gravity ab initio. Most of us do not have that kind of ability, but we can be trained to apply the equations Newton developed. Some people can pass exams, but can’t change a tire; other people cannot pass exams, but can change a tire and fix it too. People have ranges of differing abilities, which is just as well!

If only 3% of OECD 16-year-olds can answer that kind of question (against a clock, or time unconstrained?), it suggests they have not been trained to address that kind of problem.

Also, let’s not forget that we were all 16 once. And when we were 16, our hormones drove most of us to spend test times staring at the legs of our female classmates rather than focusing on the questions on the paper.

Everyone confuses and conflates Intelligence with Virtue.

Our Intelligent possess neither Virtue [good being acted on] nor Virtu [courage].

“This is because starting with WW2 the ‘Intelligent’ used tests and college and degrees to dodge either military service altogether or at least ‘shoulder a rifle’ as George Ball* put it [as in what he didn't do].”

The Intelligent of our times are at *best* clever sillies but usually the pawns of the clever not silly psychopathic Intelligent who have their way by bullying punks who want to be ‘intelligent.’
After you run out of the ‘Intelligent’ there’s always women which means in our moment of time Karens.

But as I was just telling someone I was training with the real problem with our vile, cowardly, psychopathic elites isn’t that they are cowardly scum — it’s that they look in the mirror and see Saint Francis or Gandhi and the Gandhi they see is also Stunning and Brave.

The above being my explanation of Occupy Wall Street was really a job interview. Trustifarians Virtue Signalling against their own Trust Funds and critically believing ‘passionately’ in their own sincerity is a critical test to pass for our Elite’s management track. A strange variation of Moltke the Elder’s ‘Intelligent and Lazy.’ Moltke

*George Ball was the most important man in American Diplomacy of our time, of the 1940s forward, second only in American Diplomacy importance to John Quincy Adams of whom he was the negation and antithesis, indeed the Anti-Adams in all respects. The real problem was Ball looked in the mirror and saw a Saint staring back…virtuously unaware that his own words reveal him as a sneering psychopath.

You may judge George Ball in his own words in his memoirs ‘The Past Has Another Pattern’.

Something seems wrong here. **Math majors*, plus people who have majored in subjects requiring a lot of math, such as engineering and physics, probably represent more than 2% of the population.